


Of Rabbits and Resurrection

by Artemis (Citrine)



Category: Raffles - E. W. Hornung
Genre: M/M, Raffles POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-09
Updated: 2018-03-09
Packaged: 2019-03-29 04:05:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13919019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Citrine/pseuds/Artemis
Summary: Having courted the demon of atonement and survived his embrace I found that I had no wish to repeat the experience; the fates had decreed that I live and live I would.





	Of Rabbits and Resurrection

**Author's Note:**

> A story I wrote a while ago and revised recently, not beta read though so apologies for any errors.
> 
> With apologies to E W Hornung 'Bunny's' novel is, of course Mr Justice Raffles.
> 
> I've probably overrated this by giving it a 'teen and up' rating, but I prefer to be cautious.

Of Rabbits and Resurrection

 

Bunny never married. I wish that he had. I’m a cynic to the core, but I’ve often imagined him as a happy family man, rebuilding his life after I ‘died’ for the third time.

Now this new novel of his tells me that he is alone. And broke, with holes in his socks, poor chap. No, I’m not laughing. I never laughed at him, although he sometimes thought that I did. Bunny was always solid worth through and through.

His narrative isn’t as solid as I would like though. He rambles on as he never did in his shorter, sharper, stories of our adventures. There are moments when I don’t even recognise myself in his tale and where in God’s name did he get the idea that I did it all for her? Oh, she was a pretty thing, clever too, but I’d have been as keen to shag Teddy Garland or even him and his lovely fiancée together. What a night that would have been!

Lord knows, I’ve had some adventures along the way while Bunny languished in poverty, not living the normal life I wanted him to have a crack at after I died in the war.

It wasn’t intentional – the dying I mean – at least not in the moment it happened. I’d dragged Bunny out to Africa with some half-baked notion of atoning for my sins by sacrificing my misspent life for the British Empire. Then, when the push came to the shove and that damned sniper got me I realised that I wasn’t so eager to be a dead hero after all.

That was after I came round, of course, it knocked me clean out at the time, mid-sentence if Bunny is to be believed. The Boer sharp shooter got me under the right eye, but the bullet skimmed across my cheek. (I’ve a rather dashing scar there now). When I came too there was dried blood all down my face and neck. It had even run into my ears, making the thing look a hell of a lot worse than it was. Even the medics thought I was a goner. I was chatting and joking with them and I heard one mutter that the poor bastard didn’t know he was done for, but the bastard’s still here.

So I don’t blame my Bunny one jot for his mistake.

*

Having courted the demon of atonement and survived his embrace I found that I had no wish to repeat the experience; the fates had decreed that I live and live I would.

Fortunately, the field hospital I was taken to was chaotic with the dead and the dying. It was easy enough to steal a handful of letters and to claim to be the man they were addressed to by his loving Amelia. Having half my face covered in bandages helped the deception along no end and once that wretched red dye had faded from my hair and a tash had taken up residence on my upper lip only Bunny would have known me in an instant for his beloved rogue.

There my mind strays to his new literary adventure, which, as I’ve said, is not his best or most accurate, but there is the bold title of a chapter ‘My Raffles, right or wrong.’ It was always so with him, but will it be so now if he comes to realise how I have let him languish in solitude all these years?

It wasn’t supposed to be like that, you were meant to be happy, my sweet fool. I never asked you to keep faith with my ghost. Yet here you are, living on the ashes of memories, and I have to ask myself whether it is a fire best left extinguished? Are you better with the dregs of who we were rather than with the reality of my continued existence?

Balderdash!

We could have a marvellous time you and I, just like in our old Albany days. Well, not quite, society slammed its doors in our faces long ago and one cannot simply wipe out the long years. We cannot be the young men we were in 1891. The world is not the same as it was in our glory days and neither are we; fat and forty is how you describe yourself. Forty I can live with since I am four years your senior, but fat will not do, not in our line of work, besides I still imagine you as the sun-burnt soldier I last embraced at Spion Kop. You will have to walk, swim and bicycle it off. I myself am still lithe and limber, and I while I’ve no wish to die in harness or to go on until the thing becomes ridiculous I believe that I’m good for another few years yet.

And what a time we could make of those years, with a slow and sun drenched retirement at the end of them, assuming that the luck stays with us, but I’ve always had the Devil’s own luck.

Nevertheless, I shall cross my fingers and pray that I’m lucky with Bunny tonight.

*

Bunny was afraid that I wouldn’t find him physically attractive, but he’s still my rabbit and I soon found that I could overlook a little bulk around the middle. Actually, he’s stout rather than fat, Bunny always did exaggerate, and we shall soon exercise that away - one way or another.

In the dead of night, when frost sealed the cracks in the windowpanes, he grew pensive and resentful. How many times could I rise like Lazarus from the grave and expect to be forgiven? And where the devil had I been all this time?

Where the devil hadn’t I been? Everywhere from the Winter Palace in St Petersburg to the Mile End Workhouse.

I play down some of my more exotic (and erotic) adventures, focusing on six months in a terraced house in Hull or a grim winter in a Glasgow tenement. I manage to mute the excitement of the past few years into a humdrum life, but he is not deceived.

Bunny demands that I tell what I did when I wasn’t bored and cold, and I lay it all out in glittering array. He looks around the shabby bedroom where he has slept alone for so long and bitterness sharpens the lines under his eyes. I clasp his hand and tell him again that it was never meant to be like this, that I always thought of him married and content. He sneers and pulls his hand away. Yes, he might have married if his one-time fiancée hadn’t met a man she truly loved, but did I ever really imagine that he would have been content without me?

I did, with rare and misplaced humility, I did because I had to believe that he was happy and safe. And the moment, the very moment, I knew that he wasn’t – that there might still be a place for me in his heart – I came back to him.

Bunny says that I should have sent him word long ago, that even if he had been married, it was not for me to choose his destiny for him. He cups my face in his hands and swears that he would have left her in a heartbeat. I start to say that is why I let him alone, but he employs one of my old tricks and kisses me into breathless silence.

He still kicks me out of bed at half past five. His excuse is the daily servant, an elderly widow who comes in a six and stays until ten each morning for the princely sum of five shillings a week. A five bob I suspect he can ill-afford, not that there’s any shame in poverty. I’ve been on my uppers often enough, but it isn’t the way I choose to live and I don’t see why he should either.

If this is all honesty and a scratchy pen has brought him then it shouldn’t be too difficult to persuade him to throw his lot in with the old firm. He’s not to be persuaded this morning though and out I go. It seems that it’ll take him time to come to terms with my resurrection. Mind you, he was enthusiastic enough about it last night, but one shag does not a summer make.

Interesting little bird the shag, three years ago I spent the summer posing as an ornithologist on the Lakeland fells, but that’s a story for another day. Back to my rabbit, who was all a jitter with anxiety when I knocked at his door that evening. He said that he was afraid that I wouldn’t come back and I said that I was afraid he wouldn’t want me to, and things went rather well after that.

Nevertheless, we couldn’t stay in bed forever. That saggy old mattress of his gave one chronic backache for a start and I can’t afford a dodgy back in my business. So it was up and out for a stroll through Claire Market to a cheap cafe he knew. The costermongers were packing up as we passed through and I regarded their leavings with a jaundiced eye. I’d eaten the gutter refuse of markets in Paris and Prague, but then I’d also dined at the Reichstag and more recently at one of our old haunts, Simpsons in Piccadilly.

Bunny’s little den of down at heel writers suits us very well that evening though. We manage to wangle seats in a corner next to the chimney breast, where we can be smug and talk without being overheard. He returns to the question of where I’ve been all this time. New York, Berlin, St Ives, but I’ve never stayed in one place long enough for the increase in the crime rate to catch up with me. Besides I never felt right, never felt settled, without him.

Just being together is a risk, but he recalls that cosy cottage at Ham Common, were we lived together until I decided to be a hero, with wistful longing. Bunny tells me that we could be happy in a place like that, at least until the law caught up with us. Then his ice blue eyes cut into my misbegotten soul and he adds the coup de grace or until I wake up one morning and find you gone.

I swear that won’t ever happen and I mean it, but he is not convinced. Yet he comes with me all the same, to a new life on the edge of the New Forest. There he shaves of his merger moustache and I dye my hair to its old black hue. The summer invigorates us both and in the autumn we fly south to the rich pickings of the continent. 

I will not recount our adventures there. Bunny and I have agreed that there will be no more stories of Raffles. To the world I shall remain forever dead in a foreign field, the sinner turned repentant and self-sacrificing saint, but martyrdom was never really my style. 

 


End file.
